Tag - musichackday

This week end was the Music Hackday in
London. The event was great, with everything a hack day need: pizza, beer, and
technical glitches during the demos :-) And, of course, lots of awesome hacks (including that amazing visualisation which didn't make it into
the list for some reason).

With Christopher, Patrick and Nick, we created the MusicBore. The MusicBore
is a completely automated radio DJ, which, well, tends to be really boring :-)
We actually won two prizes with it! The Last.fm
one and the best hack one! We were really, really happy :-) But let the
musicbore introduce itself:

Hello. I am the Music Bore. I play music and I like to tell you ALL about
the music I play. I live on IRC. I get my information from BBC Music, BBC
Programmes, last fm, the Echo Nest, Yahoo Weather and the web of Linked Data.
To find out more, please visit bit.ly/musicbore. You can dissect my disgusting
innards on github.
Now let me play you some music.

Here it is in action, the first one walks through Soul-ish tunes, whereas
the second one goes into French punk-rock:

The MusicBore is powered by a new and exciting messaging technology: IRC :-)
Lots of bots sit around in an IRC channel and talk to each other to create a
radio show. The show is entirely created live, each bot contributing a specific
ability to it. Just before the hack presentation, we had 10 bots in the same
channel (all the bots sources are on github):

controller: In charge of starting the show by playing an
introduction and choose a new song drawn from the BBC Music charts. Also in charge of re-drawing
a new song in case the other bots gets stuck.

connectionfinder: Given a seed artist, gives the next one
in the playlist, along with an explanation of how it was chosen. Basically
walks through Linked Data to discover new
artists.

placefinder: Given a seed artist, gives the next one in
the playlist, along with an explanation of how it was chosen. This bot is
constrained to go through places, so will give connections like Did you know
that David Guetta is born in Paris, and that Georges Garvarentz died in the
same place?

This happens a lot at the beginning of the log, bots just
throwing exceptions and quitting irc.

11:25 < thebore> connectionfinder:http://dbpedia.org/resource/David_Guetta
11:25 < connectionfinder> say:Did you know that David Guetta was born in
France which has leader name Nicolas Sarkozy, which has spouse Carla
Bruni?
11:25 < thebore> say:Carla Bruni has released 3 records. No Promises was
just terrible.

God. Nicolas Sarkozy is really in every media, even the
randomly generated ones! thebore got enlightened on that one.

10:41 < yvesr> connectionfinder:http://dbpedia.org/resource/Barry_White
10:42 < connectionfinder> say:Did you know that Barry White died in the
same city as Chico Hamilton, Los Angeles?

A morbid playlist generation :-)

11:07 < thebore> say:Colin Murray on BBC Radio One is a massive fan. They
have a myspace at myspace.com/metallica. They sound a bit like Megadeth.
They have released 524 records. I really liked 2008-11-01: Rose Garden,
Portland, OR, USA.

12:50 < thebore> connectionfinder:http://dbpedia.org/resource/Snoop_Dogg
12:50 < connectionfinder> say:Did you know that Dogg, Snoop is signed on
Death Row Records which was founded by Dr. Dre, which used to be quite
close to World Class Wreckin' Cru?

No, I didn't!

13:56 < thebore> say:Beverley Knight sounds a bit like Eternal.
In September 2005 Knight joined the likes of Bob Dylan and Joni
Mitchell by being made a Doctor of Music after receiving the honorary
degree from the University of Wolverhampton.

No, I didn't know either!

Right now, all the bots are offline (they were running on our laptops during
the week end), but we plan to use the Amazon Web Services vouchers we won to
make them run for a while :-)